Our knowledge, instead of leading us to certainty, betrays us — guiding us deeper into the confused complexity of the forest, the dark wilds of unknowing. This is holy bewilderment. This is the horizon that is forever receding and can never be reached; the periphery that is everywhere and nowhere. We find ourselves spinning in circles. We look for a centered self that isn’t there, and when we find it, it is deeply bizarre. We are confronted by an Other that can never be centered or normalized. This is the call of the Wild One. Welcome to the hunt…

The bleakness of Douglas Adams’ novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, is its critique of our willingness to treat the gods like vending machines, here to serve our needs. The god who can’t serve us is as useless and incomprehensible to us as a Coke machine with an “Out of Order” sign taped to it. It’s no coincidence that Adams portrays the gods as vagabonds who have to sleep in an abandoned train station, while the villains of the book are comfortably middle-class characters who use money to buy the luxury of ignoring “all the mess.” Does mortality offer the gods a way out?

Jeff asks, “With recent discussions in the news about human beings one day traveling to Mars and setting up colonies there, I was wondering: What would Druidry on Mars look like?”

Can you even do Druidry in space? One of the lessons that Druidry teaches is that every apparently empty “space” is already a place even before we arrive, brimming with its own qualities and communities that will inevitably draw us into relationship and change us. If the Star Trek: Original Series declaration to boldly go “where no man has gone before” is overtly sexist, the Next Generation‘s revision to go “where no one has gone before” is equally problematic…

In light of recent events and discussions, I wanted to share this essay as a robust defense of the sacred value of art, poetry and satire within both our theological explorations and our political discourse. It is my view that ambivalence itself can be sacred, for it opens us to authentic experiences of others which may be unexpected or challenging, and so we can appreciate this ambivalence and the art forms that express it as powerful and meaningful aspects of our relationship with the numinous, and with each other.

I don’t want to live in a world where we are no longer allowed to ask each other for kindness and respect. I don’t want to live in a world where one person’s anger is more important than another person’s pain. I don’t want to live in a world where our only recourse if we want to be heard is to raise our voices more and more loudly and force our anger onto others.

I would rather learn how to turn my anger into something beautiful and powerful that cannot be ignored, than to waste it in ways that can be dismissed because of my “tone.” I would rather turn my rage into an agent of compassion, than use it as a weapon against those who have hurt me.